After one of the most epic snubs in Grammy Award history and a less-than-legendary release of her album “Testimony” in the summer of 2006, singer India Arie says she was compelled to look inward for acceptance.
“I had to leave the road and get myself together,” Arie told Yoga Journal magazine in an interview for their September 2012 music issue.
According to the magazine’s contributing writers Neal Pollack and Mary Bolster:
When she returned home to Atlanta after touring, the first thing she did was kneel down and press through the balls of her feet. “It was profound how good it felt,” she says. “I just started balling my eyes out.”
Arie went on to explain how she has traveled with a yoga mat everyday since, practicing daily, changing her diet and fine tuning both herself and her music in the process.
“Everything in my music has always been emotionally and spiritually motivated…But after I started doing yoga, the place where I came from changed drastically,” she said.
Arie joins a growing list of notable blacks who’ve embraced the practice in recent years. Among them: Lebron James who credits yoga for his stamina on the court and actress Keri Washington, who’s said that yoga is most important when taken off the mat.
And while the benefits appear to be universal, several studies have explored how yoga can help close some of the health disparities between African Americans and caucasians.
In June, for example, a study among teens with high blood pressure showed that those who meditated twice a day for 15 minutes had a lower indication of future cardiovascular disease, than those who did not meditate.
